Tag: hit&run

Conventional wisdom maintains
that Libertarian Party candidates tend to seal the most votes from
Republicans. But in reality, the opposite is true. As A. Barton
Hinkle observes, come election time, Republicans are the ones
trying to siphon off libertarian voters with their opportunistic
talk about economic freedom. The real spoilers, Hinkle says, are
those voters who support either major party.

View this article.

Ah, gym class. For many kids, it injects a
45-minute burst of enjoyable exertion and playful activity into an
otherwise dreary school day.

But not so fast! All classes must become standardized under the
Common Core national education curriculum guidelines. And that
means kids should expect a fair amount of math and English to seep
into their gym time.

In an article that asks “Is Common Core Ruining Gym Class?”
Madeleine Cummings of Slate
reports that many schools are already restructuring gym class
to feature less physical activity and more studying:

Yes, even gym teachers are under pressure to teach to the
controversial new Common Core standards, which are reshaping
teaching and learning (not to mention political alliances) across
America. The Common Core calls for cross-disciplinary teaching and
the reinforcement of foundational English and math skills in not
only core academic subjects, but in art, music, and gym as well.
Test-score-conscious school principals, in turn, see any extra math
and reading practice as a way of helping children perform better on
the all-important standardized tests that increasingly determine
the fate of their schools. Who needs exercise when gym class can
serve as yet another 45-minute opportunity for teachers to shoehorn
in vocabulary and multiplication drills?

Cummings points out a big, obvious problem with all this: Gym
teachers aren’t necessarily qualified to teach math to kids—let
alone keep track of which grades are supposed to be learning
geometry, multiplication, story problems, etc.

Additionally, I simply can’t imagine that mandating even more
instructional hours—and fewer hours of physical activity—is
ultimately healthy for kids.

More from Reason on Common Core here.

Tens of thousands of Connecticut gun owners chose to become

overnight felons rather than comply with that state’s new gun
registration law. The defiance spurred the Hartford
Courant editorial board to
impotently sputter about rounding up the scofflaws.

New York’s similar registration law suffers such low compliance
that state officials won’t even reveal how many people have abide
by the measure—a desperate secrecy ploy that the New York State
Committee on Open Government
says thumbs its nose at the law itself.

Now Washington state residents pissed of about i594, a ballot
measure inflicting background check requirements on even private
transactions, plan an exercise in mass disobedience next month.

The fellow getting much of the credit for organizing the rally
is Gavin Seim, a former (unsuccessful) congressional candidate and
passionate conservative.
Seim got a lot of buzz last month when he pulled over an unmarked
police car and demanded that the officer show
identification. Perhaps surprisingly, Seim not only wasn’t
ventilated, but the officer complied.

Seim and his allies (the Facebook event
page lists Kit Lange Carroll, Sondra Seim, and Anthony P.
Bosworth as co-hosts) plan a rally for the Washington State
Capitol, in Olympia, on December 13 at 11am PST. That’s nine days
after the law goes into effect. So far, almost 6,000 people have
indicated their intention to attend and “exchange guns” without
going through a background check, in defiance of the new
requirements.

According to the state
Attorney General’s analysis, there are exceptions to the
background checks, but they’re pretty clearly delineated.

The measure would establish a number of exceptions to the
background check requirement. A background check would not be
required to transfer a firearm by gift between family members. The
background check requirement also would not apply to the sale or
transfer of antique firearms. It also would not apply to certain
temporary transfers of a firearm when needed to prevent imminent
death or great bodily harm. Background checks would not be required
for certain public agencies or officers acting in their official
capacity, including law enforcement or corrections agencies or
officers, members of the military, and federal officials. Federally
licensed gunsmiths who receive firearms solely to service or repair
them would not be required to undergo background checks.

Certain other temporary transfers of a firearm would also not
require a background check. These include temporary transfers
between spouses, and temporary transfers for use at a shooting
range, in a competition, or for performances. A temporary transfer
to a person under age eighteen for hunting, sporting, or education
would not require a background check. Other temporary transfers for
lawful hunting also would not require a background check.

A person who inherited a firearm other than a pistol upon the
death of its former owner would not be required to undergo a
background check. A person who inherited a pistol would either have
to lawfully transfer the pistol within 60 days or inform the
department of licensing that he or she intended to keep the
pistol.

Those are pretty broad exceptions (to unenforceable
requirements), but they still don’t seem to accommodate exchanges
at political rallies. What are the chances the authorities decide
this is a “performance” and so they need take no action?

Even so, if the event comes off as planned and thousands of
people show up to demonstrate an intent to publicly defy the law,
that should be an indicator that Washington’s background checks are
destined for the same fate as the registration laws in New York and
Connecticut.

Below, Seim speaks about guns and i594 in the days leading up to
the measure’s passage.

More than a decade after the West
installed a new regime in Kabul and promised to stamp out
Afghanistan’s opium trade, it’s no surprise that the authorities
have not been able to eliminate the country’s signature crop. But
as poppy production reaches new heights, I got a wry smile out of
officials’
explanation for the latest boom:

Opium cultivation and production in Afghanistan reached
record levels this year, United Nations officials said Wednesday,
blaming at least part of the increase on politicians’ need for
campaign cash during the country’s protracted election
season.

“With the presidential election ongoing, there was a huge demand of
funding and that funding is not available in the licit economy,”
said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, a senior official with the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime.

• U.S. and Chinese diplomats
  reached an agreement on curbing their respective countries’
  
  carbon emissions.
• 
  Jonathan Gruber—the MIT professor and Obamacare supporter who
  thanked the stupidity of the American voter and lack of
  transparency in D.C. for creating the environment that allowed the
  Affordable Care Act to pass—is unsurprisingly trying to walk back
  those comments.
• The FCC is not on board with President Obama’s
  Net Neutrality push.
• New York City
  metro fares could increase.
• Here is the best Hollaback! catcalling parody video yet:
  Princess
  Leia walks the streets of NYC.
• Paper magazine attempted to “break the internet” by publishing
  the results of a photo shoot that feature Kim
  Kardashian’s naked butt on display
  for all to see. The picture is probably photoshopped, but
  you’re not still reading these words, are you?

Follow Reason on Twitter and like us
on Facebook. You
can also get the top stories mailed to you—sign up
here.

President Barack Obama recently came out in favor
of both “net neutrality” and the FCC changing the way that Internet
service providers, or ISPs, are regulated. Shortly thereafter, Sen.
Ted Cruz opined “‘Net Neutrality’ is Obamacare for the Internet;
the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.”
Obama’s and Cruz’s statements fed into the popular misconception
that the proposed FCC reclassification is the same thing as net
neutrality. It’s not. The policies are distinct, writes Grant
Babcock, though both are bad ideas.

View this article.

Of the three
jurisdictions where voters approved marijuana legalization
last week, Washington, D.C., is the smallest but the most
symbolically potent. Jacob Sullum says the prospect of legal
marijuana in the nation’s capital presents a challenge
to the Republicans who will soon control both houses of Congress:
Will they respect democracy and local control, or will they insist
that Washingtonians toe a prohibitionist line that is steadily
disappearing?

View this article.

A recent Brickbat told
of how Danny
Westneat used the GPS tracker on his wife’s stolen iPhone
to locate and follow a van containing the phone. Despite doing all
their work for them, Westneat was unable to get Seattle police to
do anything. Well, just a few says later, a woman called to report
a suspicious
van in her neighborhood. This time, she was able to get a
police car to respond, and the officer immediately recognized it as
one fitting numerous wanted bulletins. Yeah, it was the same van
Westneat had tried and failed to get them to stop. It turns out the
people in it are suspects in hundreds of vehicle break ins.

Tonight’s live episode of The
Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT,
with re-airs three hours later) includes a couple of segments on
Veterans Day. Iraq War vet and former Marine Dan Caldwell of Concerned
Veterans for America will react to a Salon.com
piece by David Masciotra with the headline: “You don’t protect
my freedom: Our childish insistence on calling soldiers heroes
deadens real democracy.” And Kmele Foster will show a clip from
the great documentary he produced along with ex-Reasoner Dan Hayes,
Honor
Flight. Here’s the 2009 Reason TV video that got that
project started:

Party Panelists Ellis
Henican (Newsday columnist) and Sherrod Small (comedian)
will deconstruct the body language and fashion choices of Barack
Obama and Vladimir Putin at their APEC non-summit; assess the
late-breaking
volley of criticism against Obama consigliere Valerie Jarrett;
vote whether sex will soon be
100% non-procreative, and examine the case of a Virginia Tech
Young Americans for Freedom chapter that got its
funding pulled after hosting an anti-immigration lecture by Bay
Buchanan.

Did you know America is now
Ebola-free, at least as far as we know? We’ll talk about that.
And there’ll be an interview with the great free speech champion
Flemming Rose, culture editor of Jyllands-Posten (think:

Mohammed cartoons), who will talk about his new book,

The Tyranny of Silence.

Online-only aftershow begins at http://ift.tt/QYHXdy
just after 10. Follow The Independents on Facebook at
http://ift.tt/QYHXdB,
follow on Twitter @ independentsFBN, and
click on this page
for more video of past segments.

Yesterday the New York Police Department
announced a new policy under which people caught with small
amounts of marijuana in public generally will not be arrested but
will instead be cited for a violation
punishable by a maximum fine of $100. Police union officials were
not pleased. “I just see it as another step in giving the streets
back to the criminals,” Michael Palladino, president of the
Detectives’ Endowment Association,
told The New York Times. “And we keep inching closer
and closer to that.”

Palladino’s comments were reminiscent of the response from Ed
Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, to
a recent report that the NYPD will no longer use “buy and bust”
tactics to nab small-time pot dealers. “If the current practice of
making arrests for both possession and sale of marijuana is, in
fact, abandoned,” Mullins
told the New York Post last week, “then this
is clearly the beginning of the breakdown of a civilized
society.”

Some historical perspective might allay the fears of those who
believe that civilization cannot survive a reduction in pot busts.
New York’s legislature decriminalized marijuana possession way back
in 1977, making people caught with up to 25 grams (about
nine-tenths of an ounce) subject to the aforementioned fine instead
of arrest and possible jail time. Possessing marijuana that is
“burning or open to public view,” a.k.a. “criminal possession of
marihuana in the fifth degree,” remained a Class B
misdemeanor, punishable by a $500 fine and up to three months
in jail. But according to data gathered by Queens College
sociologist Harry Levine, arrests for that offense were
relatively rare from 1978 until 1997, the fourth year of Rudolph
Giuliani’s administration, when they increased dramatically from
less than 10,000 to almost 18,000. After that they kept climbing,
peaking at more than 51,000 in 2000 but never again dropping below
27,000.

Levine found that the NYPD
averaged 2,259 minor pot busts a year under Ed Koch, 982 under
David Dinkins, and 24,487 under Giuliani. Michael Bloomberg outdid
even Giuliani, presiding over a cannabis crackdown
that generated an average of nearly 39,000 low-level possession
arrests a year.

There are several possible explanations for this enormous
increase in pot busts. Perhaps cannabis consumers suddenly became
much more brazen, waving their weed under cops’ noses in a way they
didn’t from 1978 through 1996. Perhaps they always carried their
cannabis conspicuously, and cops suddenly decided they would no
longer accept such ostentatious violations of the law. Or perhaps
cops started to bust people for having marijuana “open to public
view” after patting them down or instructing them to empty their
pockets during street stops.

Those explanations are not mutually exclusive, but reports
from defendants and their lawyers suggest that the practice of
transforming violations into misdemeanors by bringing marijuana
into “public view” was
pretty common. It was common enough to generate an
extraordinary 2011 directive
from Ray Kelly, Bloomberg’s police commissioner, reminding his
officers that such trickery is illegal. “To support a charge [of
criminal possession], the public display of marihuana must be an
activity undertaken of the subject’s own volition,” Kelly wrote.
“Thus, uniformed members of the service lawfully exercising their
police powers during a stop may not charge the
individual with [criminal possession] if the marihuana recovered
was disclosed to public view at an officer’s
discretion.”

It so happens that 2011 was the peak year for pot
busts during the Bloomberg administration, so maybe Kelly’s memo
had an impact. Marijuana arrests fell from more than 50,000 in 2011
to less than 29,000 in 2013. The decline also coincided with a
sharp drop in stop-and-frisk
encounters.

The Times
notes that “critics have said the police and prosecutors have
been improperly charging people with possession of marijuana in
public view, often after officers ask them to empty their pockets
during street stops.” But yesterday Kelly’s
successor, Bill Bratton, “said such practices were not now in use
and the problem had been fixed.” If so, it’s a
bit mysterious how the new policy will result in fewer pot busts,
especially since the NYPD will continue to arrest people who are
openly smoking cannabis. Will the impact be confined to people who
have removed joints from their pockets but have not lit them
yet?

However the NYPD manages it, any reduction in pot busts
will be an improvement, and Mayor Bill de Blasio deserves credit
for belatedly following through on his
promise to change an “unjust and wrong” policy. But if you
worry that the shift signals the end of civilization, note that the
NYPD could cut low-level possession arrests in half and still bust
a lot more pot smokers than it did in any year prior to
1997.